by Jenny Colgan
Posy liked her Australian boss. He had thinning hair, a big squishy paunch and an unutterable disdain for insurance and practically anyone who bothered to take it out. ‘If it’s going to hit you, it’s going to hit you,’ he was fond of saying. ‘Five thousand lousy dollars aren’t going to make you feel much better. And we’re going to dispute the hell out of it anyway and send the investigators in. You should probably just go to Primark and get new stuff and not bother us.’ It was hard to know how he’d got into a service industry really. He had the delicate sensitivities of a hungry goat.
‘So, what’s up?’
Posy mentally shook herself, then showed him her ring. ‘Matt and I got engaged.’
Gavin rolled his eyes. ‘Another one bites the dust.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, nothing . . . marriage is great. If you like, you know. Fatness. And doing the same stuff all the time but finding new ways to bicker about it. And writing a book of resentment.’
‘What’s a book of resentment?’
Gavin gave a twisted smile. ‘Oh, you’ll find out.’ He was going through a very nasty divorce, and it did occasionally leak out into the office.
Gavin pulled himself together as the lift pinged at their floor. ‘But, you know, congratulations. Statistically, you know, it’s slightly better than fifty-fifty. How old are you again?’
‘Thirty-two.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Well, OK, it’s about fifty-fifty. That’s great!’
‘That’s the least convincing pronunciation of “That’s great” I’ve ever heard,’ Posy said.
Fortunately at reception there were some of her friends in marketing, who all squealed in delight. They liked Matt (most people did) and liked weddings and, apart from Margie, who said it made her nails look a bit square - but that was Margie, and had been since . . . well, she wasn’t thinking about him now - they liked her ring too. Margie was in her late thirties, with frizzy hair, magnificent breasts always hidden in a cardigan, no waist and a deep-seated grudge against a world that did not have enough handsome men for dumpy women who had four cats.
Posy had been at the firm for five years. She now headed up the marketing team and although she knew it was fashionable to hate your job, she rather liked hers. She liked her officemates, and her boss. Sometimes she felt she ought to move a bit more, round out her CV, but then again, it wasn’t like there was much out there, and she was respected where she was. Her mother thought she was woefully unambitious, but Posy felt safe and competent and couldn’t understand her mother’s disappointment.
They turned it into an excuse to go to Pizza Express for lunch to celebrate and Posy told the whole story of the proposal and everyone oohed and aahed, except Margie, who sniffed and looked bored, and all in all it felt much more satisfactory than when she’d told supposedly her two closest people in the world. She started to perk up.
It was great. It was fine. Any doubts she had . . . anything Leah had said . . . it was only pre-wedding nerves. Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?
Chapter Four
‘What’s up with you?’ said Matt as Posy turned and twisted on the bed.
They had bought the flat together in an area of south London that was profoundly tipped to be up and coming. Soon. At any point. In the next four decades or so. They were on the seventh floor of a tower block, their neighbours a mix of original residents and young people trying to buy their first home. The sitting room was tiny, their bedroom only really big enough for them and a bed and ten pairs of Matt’s gigantic trainers, but it was theirs, it was affordable, and when the clouds cleared, and if you stood on tiptoe, you could see Big Ben.
‘Nothing,’ Posy said, taking the opportunity of knowing Matt was definitely awake to ripple over in the bed.
Posy knew it wasn’t fair to inflict her insomnia on Matt. He had a big day - physical training was hard work, he was always knackered and needed his energy for the morning. It had seemed such a ridiculous job when she met him. Everyone she knew went into the office in the morning, and ever since she’d moved to London she’d rather enjoyed that: the commuter coffee, the flow of the masses of people from trains and buses and tubes, enjoyed feeling part of the engine of work. But here was someone who got up at five a.m., who disappeared to distant parks with rich wives and American bankers, who often went to bed at eleven in the morning for a nap, who was always hungry and ate whatever she put in front of him, sometimes followed by four scrambled eggs and three bananas.
He was always trying to get her into doing more exercise, which of course she resisted furiously, although she couldn’t deny she loved its effects on him; his smooth muscles and flat stomach. She knew her friends and family thought he was a bit of arm candy, not really a brain box, and didn’t take him seriously. But they were wrong, weren’t they? she thought to herself. OK, so he wasn’t a poetic, serious type like . . . Still her brain refused to let her think of the name. OK, he was more straightforward. But that was a good thing.
What was wrong with her? Everything was going so right. Maybe she was just excited. Posy turned over and glanced at his profile in the bed. He was gorgeous, much better looking than her. When pressed he would confess that he thought she was ‘cute’. Nobody ever thought Fleur was cute. They thought she was gorgeous and deserved having poetry written for her.
Anyway. She wasn’t thinking about Fleur. She was thinking about how she was the luckiest girl in the world. Yes. She was. She had a fantastic man by her side who wanted to spend his life with her. What a spoilt witch to even have to think twice about it. After her chequered love life . . . There had been Chris, of course, her university boyfriend. She was sure they were friends on Facebook somewhere and she remembered him fondly. Unlike Adam, who she’d been reminded of today. Oh Adam, he was such a wanker. Although . . .
She wished she’d got a bit more information from Sasha. About where Adam was, at least; what he was doing. She hadn’t wanted to ask, it would have made her seem such a saddo. All these years on. But it was natural, wasn’t it?
She twisted her ring fiercely in the dark. No. No, it wasn’t. Oh God.
‘Stop wriggling,’ said Matt fiercely. ‘Or you are going under the bed, I’m up in three hours.’
Posy wants to go back to bed but do night properly this time.
‘Are you on Facebook again?’
‘No,’ said Posy, hurriedly switching her applications round. Trust Margie not just to notice that she was on Facebook, but bellow it out to the entire office.
‘I really think they should take it off the system, don’t you?’ said Margie. ‘It’s not really fair on the rest of us when we’re trying to work hard.’
Posy didn’t want to add that Margie’s idea of working hard seemed to involve walking round the office with a file under her arm and a coffee cup in her hand, sniffing out other people’s chocolate biscuits.
‘Hmm,’ she said, but the second Margie left, she flicked it back on again; something had caught her eye. She felt terrible, like she had a hangover, even though she hadn’t been drinking - it was just lack of sleep. She glanced at the page again, an odd pang of guilt assailing her. Nonetheless, it couldn’t be denied. Coincidence be damned. She gets engaged, then runs into a friend of Adam’s, and now this. The universe wants her to look up her exes. It must do.
Because there in black and white it was, next to an indecipherable photograph: Chris is cold.
Funny, she’d hardly even noticed Chris friending her. Maybe in the heady early days when you got four friend requests a day. It was surprising he was even on there, he had always been such a Luddite. And suddenly, just a day after she’d run into someone connected to Adam, here he was. In fact . . . She checked the time. It was posted last night. So on the same day she’d had to think of Adam, Chris had popped up in her consciousness too. If she were Fleur, she would definitely definitely take this as a sign. She wasn’t, of course, she reminded herself. No way. If she were Fleur she’d have a ribbon-covered net over her bed t
hat she thought could catch dreams.
Anyway, she hadn’t seen hide nor hair of him in years, years . . . Posy realised that she’d always have liked to have thought of herself as someone who stayed casually and politely in touch with all her exes. Hmm. Big Chris.
Posy took herself out to lunch. Strangely, when she’d first come back to London she didn’t like doing this, thinking it made her look single and alone. But now, of course, she had her ring. Her protector. She ordered a mozzarella panini (Matt would have sniffed very loudly had he seen it), and remembered. Big Chris. He’d been on the next landing to her in Freshers’ Week. A big bear of a chap, with shaggy, sandy-coloured hair and broad shoulders, they’d noticed each other in the ref, at the freshers’ party, at the student paper - until it started to get embarrassing that they hadn’t been introduced. He didn’t seem to know the cluster of girls Posy had met straight off. And when they’d been drawing up their list of uni ‘hunks’, he’d been straight on it. But Posy thought, also, that there was something different about him. He wasn’t just a good-looking lunkhead; there was something else, and not just the fact that he stood head and shoulders above everybody else.
‘Hey,’ she’d said finally.
‘Hey,’ he’d said. ‘What?’
‘What do you mean, “What”? It’s Freshers’ Week, isn’t it? When we’re meant to be making friends and talking to people and stuff?’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Was that it?’
After that there was a pause. Posy just assumed he was weird, and didn’t think about him again, throwing herself with gusto into every club she could find. Then, three days later, he came up and sat next to her in the breakfast canteen.
‘Hey,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Nothing! I thought that’s what we were doing.’
‘Well, you are, but then you have to introduce yourself and stuff. Have you actually met a human person before?’
His accent was nice; Liverpudlian. He sighed. ‘I just . . . I mean, are you about to tell me how many A-levels you got?’
‘It might have been on my list as a topic for discussion, yes.’
‘And ask me what I’m studying?’
‘It’s just small talk. It doesn’t mean anything! It’s just a way of saying hello.’
‘OK,’ he said. Then he proceeded to plough silently through an enormous bowl of porridge.
After four days of this, Posy could take it no longer. ‘What do you want to talk about then?’
Chris had shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Do you like animals?’
Posy was taken aback. She’d expected him to say quantum physics, or poetry - she’d met a lot of people who’d arrived at university determined to make a splash as serious grown-up intellectuals who disdained small talk, and had assumed he was just one of them. But now she wasn’t so sure.
‘To eat or to look at?’
‘Whichever.’
‘Well, I like bears,’ said Posy slowly, not entirely sure where this was going. ‘Polar bears mostly. Hey, what do polar bears eat for lunch?’
‘I don’t know - a Happy Seal?’
Posy grinned. ‘A brr-GRR!’
That was the first time she ever saw him smile. He had lovely teeth.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Polar bears are cool. I like the way they’re almost perfectly camouflaged except for their enormous eyes. Seals must think they get attacked by small lumps of coal.’
‘Brown bears are funny, too,’ said Posy. ‘When, you know, they’re in the circus. Wearing hats and driving small cars.’
‘I don’t think you’re allowed to do that to bears any more,’ said Chris.
‘Oh no,’ said Posy. ‘Quite right too. I didn’t mean it wasn’t viciously cruel, you know . . .’
‘When they nail the hat to the bear’s head?’
‘Yeah, kind of.’
He’d smiled. ‘Want to go for lunch?’
‘Don’t we already go for breakfast every day?’ said Posy.
‘Yes, but there are a lot of animals in the world. We’ve barely scratched the surface.’
And, to her complete surprise, that had been that. He was, bar a few adolescent fumbles, Posy’s first real, proper boyfriend. Incredibly sweet, good-looking in a shaggy, large kind of a way, unusual and intense, Posy had simply never met anyone like him before. All around her at university her new friends were experimenting with boys and drinking, but she was quite happy to spend her time with Chris. He wasn’t like anyone else and he didn’t give two figs for them either. Compared with her desperate nervousness, trying to bounce between her mother and her father (and his new wife Marian, a brittle blonde who talked a lot and bought Fleur and her sweets like they were nine years old, which Jonquil immediately threw in the bin), he was like a slightly distracted professor. It was quite sexy.
All his clothes were covered in holes. He was studying Civil Engineering, and could often be found in pubs absent-mindedly building physically unlikely bridges out of matches and cigarette papers. He didn’t give the tiniest rat’s fart what anyone thought of him and bowed to no social graces whatsoever. Oddly, this only seemed to make him more popular. This was hard for Posy to understand - she’d spent most of her life trying not to stick out too far, as much as one could with a mother who liked to use her as a psychiatric test case: ‘POSY! This skeleton who lives under your bed - would you say he was very threatening, quite threatening or actively terrifying? Maybe I should use you at a conference.’
Chris, though, stuck out a mile, being at least five inches and twenty kilos larger than anyone else, with holes in his shoes the rain came in and a pencil usually stuck in his hair.
Two weeks later, she lost her virginity to him on a narrow bed in their halls of residence, the metal frame banging against the small sink, the comforting fuggy smell of him - wool, a slightly bovine warmth, beer and rolled up cigarettes - something she would take with her till her dying day.
‘Hey, what did you think?’ she’d whispered afterwards. ‘Was it your first time too?’
‘Uh, no,’ he said. ‘Well, at least I don’t think so.’
‘What do you mean, you don’t think so?’
‘You may find this hard to believe, but I think it can be difficult to tell.’ Chris snuffled a bit.
‘Are you . . . are you embarrassed?’
‘No! Are you?’
In truth, Posy had spent quite a lot of the experience thinking, Oh my God! I’m having sex! This is what I’m doing! Right now! Oh my God! and resisting a strong urge to giggle at the sheer ridiculousness of it all.
‘Uh, yes,’ she admitted finally. ‘I am a bit embarrassed.’
‘By me? Are you embarrassed by me?’
‘No,’ said Posy, snuggling into his cosy hairy chest. ‘You are very very sexy. It’s more the concept than anything else.’
Chris thought about it. ‘God, you’re right. Can we be honest with each other?’
‘Uh, dunno.’ Now it was Posy’s turn to feel weird.
‘Oh, OK.’
‘Well, what? What is it?’
‘It doesn’t matter. You’re beautiful, you know?’
He ran his hand over her smooth tummy and round hips. At the time Posy thought he was just being polite. Only now, at thirty-two and definitely feeling her normally easy-to-manage figure start to deteriorate - always a problem when you liked to cook - could she fully appreciate how lovely her young body must indeed have been. She wished she’d appreciated it at the time instead of fretting a lot and wearing dungarees.
‘Yeah yeah yeah.’
They kissed, so they wouldn’t have to face up to the truth that neither of them knew at the time that it could, and would, get a lot better. Posy could feel the raw stubble grazes on her chin.
‘Shall we try again?’
She smiled. ‘Do you think we need the practice?’
‘Couldn’t hurt.’
It did hurt a bit, actually, but Posy was so pleased to finally get her wings, she didn’t re
ally care.
It was odd being a couple at university. While all around them their friends were getting drunk, throwing up, having unfortunate one-night stands and missing lectures, they found a house together and cooked up cheap veggie lasagne. They became a port of call for friends in trouble, broke, upset. They were like an old married couple, more than one person remarked to them. This irritated Posy. They weren’t anything like a married couple, thank you very much. They sat up late, discussing the universe. They got drunk at gigs and voted in college elections. They were a fixture, and perfectly happy about it, thank you.
As Fleur pointed out loudly and repeatedly when she visited, you didn’t need to have a PhD in Psychology to watch Posy, cooking up bean stew and chilli, fussing around Chris like a mother hen, to guess what she was up to.
Their little terraced house, with its ethnic cloths on the walls and tables littered with Rizla papers, was cosy and frequently crowded. It was a home. Posy didn’t mind the fact that people treated them like Mum and Dad, didn’t even mind getting frequent cups of tea for the evening Chris had his engineering chums round and they sat in a circle and talked load-bearing parabolas and rolled joints. She even liked the fact that she didn’t understand what they were talking about - her own degree in Marketing seemed a lot more banal by comparison. OK, she wished some of his friends would change their socks more often, but that was all part of the experience, wasn’t it? As well as living off bean casserole. OK, Chris and his mates were smoking more and more dope, which she could do without - they got messy and smelly and very hungry and she found it too boring to join in - but apart from that life seemed to be turning out quite well so far. Calm. Posy felt she’d negotiated the shift from home to university rather well.
Not everyone saw it like that. Her mother tutted a lot and, while polite to Chris, clearly showed that she felt Posy should be experimenting with drugs and boys and not getting steady B averages.